"Therapeutic" Attempts to Influence Gender & Sexual Orientation

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Surveys indicate as much as 70 percent of the American public is "homophobic." That misnomer suggests that people fear homosexuals; a more appropriate term would be homomisic, from the Greek term misos ("hatred"), since many Americans actually hate gays.

It is widely considered that cure is impossible, because autism involves aspects of brain structure that are determined very early in development. However, there are persistent claims that some individuals after diagnosis have been helped to recover.

When a six year old boy discovers his mother's blue ball gown and begins lip synching to Judy Garland, he soon finds himself visiting a Dr. Richard Green at the U.C.L.A. Neuro Psychiatric Department with 63 other sissy boys

'Conversion' groups promise the impossible. Years are spent in prayer, fasting, in isolation, and, in extreme cases, undergoing torturous procedures such as electro-shock therapy. Sham marriages, fake relationships, and inner pain are the only results.

I am an ex-gay survivor. That means a lot to me because for over 17 years of my adult life, I trapped myself in the futile quest to become straight. I wish I were the only person who put himself through such a painful experience, but there are many of us who strove to change and finally embraced ourselves for who we were created to be. There are some today still caught in the midst of the struggle.

We recognize today that trying to convert left-handers into right-handers is misguided. Left-handedness is not an illness. Neither is homosexuality. Yet, promoting so-called reparative therapy is a priority for antigay activists.

Dr. Paul Cameron is the man behind the false statistics used by the radical right. He is responsible for such statistics as "the average life span of a homosexual is 39 years old." However, his statistics have never been accepted by any mainstream psychological, psychiatric, epidemiological or sociological organizations.

The past three decades have witnessed a well-publicized trend for certain vocal elements in education and the media in American culture to sharply question the legitimacy of many, if not all, sex role distinctions in the socialization of children.

Rekers and Lovaas go to great lengths to explain why it was important to behaviorally treat a child like Kraig. The first reason was that the child will be scorned by his playmates; that it is easier to change the child than the society in which he lives.

Here we have three studies said to link genes to different behaviours, but we need to remember correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Only in the first has an actual causation been shown and, even then, it was variable.

Heavily influenced by the conservative Cold War era, psychoanalysis slowly became the defender of the political and cultural status quo. This led to a plethora of bizarre 'scientific' theories about homosexuality.

This paper examines the relationship between the growing visibility of male homosexuality in Brazil’s two most important urban centers and the increase in writings about same-sex eroticism by physicians, criminologists, and jurists...

Like all students, those who are or are perceived to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual are protected by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which, among other things, requires the separation of church and state.

As with any societal prejudice, anti-homosexual bias negatively affects mental health, contributing to an enduring sense of stigma and pervasive self-criticism in people of same-gender sexual orientation through the internalization of such prejudice.

American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues

Even if no ample evidence supports such a claim (that sexual orientation is biologically determined), 'reparative' therapy on children should still be considered abuse and neglect because of its damaging effects.

Corbet talks about feminine boys -- both hetero and homo -- who should not be pathologized by GID. He argues that basically this diagnosis is being used to pathologize and then convert feminine boys back to being ordinarily gendered boys.

In personality and abnormal psychology, you might discuss the ways in which notions of pathology are rooted in sociohistorical conditions and ideologies, using illustrations that focus on many forms of diversity.

Task Force on Diversity Issues at the Precollege and Undergraduate Levels of Education in Psychology, American Psychological Association

Our study shows the negative consequences of defining same sex attraction as a mental illness and designing treatments to eradicate it. It serves as a warning against the use of mental health services to change aspects of human behaviour that are disapproved of on social, political, moral, or religious grounds.

Modern medical practice requires an adequate evidence base for treatments and requires that clinicians and members of government consider the adequacy and appropriateness of disease entities that originate from the interplay of scientific and social perspectives.

Reparative therapy will appear to make sense and sound reasonable to people who don«t challenge the initial assumption that homosexuality is a disease or a complex. Failure to challenge that assumption is the crux of the matter.

The psychological, medical and psychiatric establishments agree that sexual orientation cannot be changed, and that so-called 'reparative therapy' aimed at altering gay peoples' orientations does not work and may, in fact, be harmful.